7 Critical SEO Mistakes That Could Hurt Your Marketing Efforts

Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical in increasing your company’s online visibility, which would lead to organic growth. And having an effective SEO strategy enables your website to be ranked higher in search engines—most especially Google—which also makes your content more visible on search engine results pages (SERPs). This depends on the choice of keywords you use to drive more users to your website.

Therefore, you need the right SEO approach or get help from an expert to improve the quality of your website and make it easier to understand, easier to navigate, and quicker to open. Being noticed in SERPs is a growing need, with Google making it tougher for businesses to stay at the top. So if you have a blog, website, or an ecommerce shop, you need to be diligent to the rules of the game. That said, in this post, you’ll learn what to avoid in your SEO strategy and strengthen your marketing efforts.

Wrong Keyword Choice 

Your website, ecommerce shop, or blog is ranked in search engines by the keywords you use. You have to make sure to choose keywords that won’t hurt you in the search results. When choosing your keywords, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Speculate on which keywords your customers would likely use to search for your products and services. Determine both your keywords and long-tail keywords well before the start of your SEO campaign.

You may need to do some research because your choice of words may mean a different thing to some of your customer base or one approach is to utilize generic terms. Even though you’ve invested in SEO, your efforts might not yield the results you’ve desired. Some expert keyword tools you can use for your campaign include Google Trends, Google AdWords Keyword Planner, and SEMrush, all of which help you see trending and plenty of keywords to use.

Employing Black Hat Methods 

Many individuals and companies fall into this mistake in search of quicker results. This is a big blunder as you’ll be violating search engine guidelines. Google has established a way of monitoring websites that violate rules for optimization and penalize the concerned websites or even completely ban them. Some black hat tactics to avoid are keyword stuffing, purchased links, hidden text, link exchanges, and blog comment spamming.

Ignoring Title Tags And Meta Descriptions 

Apart from keywords, title tags and meta descriptions are other parameters that Google uses to rank your website. Search engines will crawl them when searching on your website. Ensure that you use recommended and good practices as it’ll improve the visibility of your website. Also include image tags as they help Google know which images you’re posting when indexing your page.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content refers to having similar content on more than a single page which could be in the same domain or different domains. The setback with this is that search engines find it hard to choose which page should be indexed and may lead to all content being ignored. Although search engines can be able to know which of the content should be indexed, other times, they can be wrong which may work against your website.

Duplicate content may be using duplicate URLs inconsistently, which may lead to confusion of search bots and can devalue your URL and lower your SERPs ranking. You need to use plagiarism checker tools to make sure that you don’t use content from another website. You ought to be keen because the person you’ve hired to create your content might not be an SEO expert. Thus, using experts in this matter will save you from search engine penalties.

Slow Pages 

It’s good to use videos, photographs, and banners on your website as they make your website beautiful. However, you need to make sure that your website isn’t stuffed with excessive media as they may make your website slow to load. Slow websites make customers lose patience and leave your website for your competitors’. This mostly applies to mobile device users who may not have a strong internet connection most of the time or are using older phone models.

Whenever a visitor enters your website, search engines monitor the time they take to load up your website. If your website doesn’t have staying visitors, it means that they weren’t able to get what they needed. Your website may be loading slowly because of limited plugins, caching programs, or poor codes.

Lack Of Website Auditing 

You ought to frequently audit your website where you review and boost the performance of your website to connect and better identify with your target audience and also search engines. You may need to answer the following questions:

• Is it easy for visitors to get what they want?
• Is the website mobile friendly?
• Is the website user friendly?
• How fast does it load?

Website audit should ensure that the above pain points are well addressed, not forgetting technical SEO, content quality, and other criteria.

Poor Branded EAT And SEO 

SEO doesn’t focus on ranking solely on SERPs but also on establishing a trustworthy brand. Websites that are popular, genuine, and trustworthy are preferred by search engines—especially the biggest one, Google. This is called expertise, authority, and trust (EAT). Google crawlers determine your website’s EAT with intelligent algorithms and data points. To boost your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, just follow these steps:

• Incorporate brand-related searches in your SEO strategy.
• Appear in the top media publications.
• Give general data about your company such as an address, recognitions, awards won, and author bios.

Conclusion 

The millions of websites, online shops, and blogs on the internet make SEO strategies indispensable. In case you don’t have the right skill set to boost your ranking on SERPs, you should hire a digital marketing agency to help you in your quest to better optimize your website for the internet.

Keep yourself updated on any new guidelines that Google may provide so you avoid all black hat methods. Besides that, use branded SEO and EAT, do website auditing, craft professional title tags and meta descriptions, and, most importantly, use the right keywords so your business stays on top (literally, in internet terms) of the competition.